“Remember we have freedom here! People are free to believe what they will, build churches and make contributions. But our government does not support religion in any way. There are no tax deductions for anything, let alone religion. And we keep a strict separation between church and state.
"Actually religious people are very few because, as you know the more educated the person the less likely he or she is to believe in a religion, especially the big three religions of the West. We study science, the fact of evolution, and the inconsistencies in the Western Scriptures. Certainly the Bible and Koran are among the most, if not the most, important books in Western history. That does not mean that they are true, only that they have been very influential. Just as the story of 'Little Red Riding Hood' may be influential to a child in making her cautious when going out of her house, the story is not true. The Bible and Koran have been influential in the history of the Western world, even though they are not true."
" Well that is certainly a matter of opinion. I would like to debate that with you but it would take days or weeks.”
"Ray you know it is useless to debate basic assumptions. But we are tolerant of people's freedom to believe what they will. But in your country you have had a long tradition of intolerance to people who are not solidly within your Christian confines. Thomas Jefferson, while running for president, was criticized for his deistic beliefs. William Howard Taft was criticized for his Unitarian beliefs. John Kennedy, you well know Ray, was suspect for his Catholic beliefs. And even Dwight Eisenhower was criticized because he didn’t attend church much and his parents were Jehovah’s Witnesses."
CHARITY
-”What about charity? I don’t think it’s possible for a group of people to be totally selfish.”
"I agree with you. I think our charity starts at home with our children. Beyond that our people can donate as much as they would like, up $100,000, to any group. Because of our dedication to freedom, most people seem to give to freedom causes. By far our most important charity is to stop slavery, both child slavery and sex slavery. There is no more an affront to allowing people equality of opportunity than slavery. A second important area of our charity is to educate children throughout the world. Often this means giving more money to educating girls because they are the ones who are most prejudiced against by their own families and societies. Here again, they are being denied equality of opportunity. The charities lower on our list are those that help people who have helped themselves.
“What I was just mentioning are our private charities. Our government also gives some money to support equality of opportunity, particularly in reducing slavery. While this isn’t really a charity, a couple of our largest businesses are geared to both fighting slavery and to mass education. They sell their wares to a number of other governments and to philanthropists. For example, our very inexpensive solar powered computers and televisions are the best and least expensive in the world. We often give away our educational programs to go along with the televisions and computers that are sold.
"We also have an international detective agency that sells its services to Interpol, the FBI, Mossad and other national security agencies that may be investigating sex slavery and prostitution. One of our more successful operations along this line is the development of extensive worldwide contacts with the common people. They are paid for leads on sex traffickers and child slavery operations. We also have a similar program for rewarding tipsters about criminals who help people immigrate illegally. As you can imagine there is money to be made from both philanthropists and governments in these areas.
"The international education programs that we have developed, using village televisions has been astounding. I have to admit that we borrowed the idea from Mrs. Doors' work in Indus. (19) We just took her ideas, internationalized them, and sold them to governments and philanthropists as better methods of foreign aid than just giving money to the countries’ presidents. Of course, with better education, better presidents were being elected. However not all Third World countries were interested in having their youth better educated. But this remnant of the past has been rapidly declining as international groups have pressured their individual members to work for education as a way out of poverty and as a way to forestall revolutions. The Arab League and other such groups can wield a good deal of pressure among its members.
"I might mention that we not only supply the inexpensive hardware for this mass education, we are among the leaders in producing software and video games that make them effective. Because of our own extensive liberal arts education, our programmers have a good knowledge of how to make education become more meaningful and enjoyable.
"So our charity work involves the use of many of the products that we have developed and manufactured. In fact many countries buy from us for their own foreign aid charities.
“We are not much for the ‘forestalling death’ types of charities like heart disease and cancer research. Nationally our priorities are for freedom and for equality of opportunity which is basic to that freedom."
-”What about the idea that charity begins at home? One in seven people in the US get help from the federal government in putting food on the table. Don't you have a program to help some people when they really need it?"
"We have a small amount of money set aside for emergencies such as if both parents of a small child were killed and did not yet have insurance, the government could take care of child. But we can't set aside money for every negative contingency in the population. That would increase our taxes."
LAWS ARE FEW BUT WELL ENFORCED
-"OK, so we now have a little bit of the philosophy of government and education that you people want to live by. What kinds of laws do you have, or do you have any?”
"As you can imagine we don't have near the number of laws that you have. Every law passed is a single law with the requirements on how it will be financed—what new taxes will be required or what previous spending programs will be eliminated to pay for it. We don't have the number of loans and deficits you have, and we don't have a number of people getting government benefits. However I guess that every government has some economic fat that can be trimmed. In our bills there are no earmarks allowed. In your country it is ridiculous that you can have a bill for healthcare with earmarks tacked on to the bill by different legislators giving money to improve roads in Alabama, establish a recycling center in California, give subsidies to cotton growers in Mississippi, and, build a bridge to nowhere in Alaska. Your legislators bribe the bill's sponsors by promising to vote ‘yes’ if their pet projects are included. This is definitely corruption from our point of view. With us every spending bill must be separate. We learned what not to do by watching your American system.
“We in the public don't vote on every law, just the major ones. Our representatives do most of the work. But if it turns out that the lawmakers
didn’t see the eventualities of their legislation and a law was not working out but the representatives did not see fit to change it, we can do something like your California voters. We don't get signatures, we do it all on the Internet. I'm sure that about every advanced country has their laws available on the Internet. I know the US does. The way we do it is that if the citizen does not like a law he or she can go to the statutes and check a box that indicates that it should be changed. When 50,000 people have done this, the law is reevaluated by the legislature and will be voted on by the electorate.
“We don't give the courts authority over our legislature or our democratic voting. We citizens keep control. In California your electorate's democratic vote can be overturned by a judge or eventually, if it reaches the U.S. Supreme Court, by five of the nine judges. You people seem to be proud of your checks and balances between your legislative, executive and judicial branches.
I know that many of your founding fathers, particularly Jefferson, read Montesquieu's 'Spirit of Laws.' It advocated the separation of powers. You Americans really like that idea of dividing authorit
y. But it is no surprise that Montesquieu’s work was banned by the Vatican. There is no question that a single power is more efficient than divided powers but the traditions of the Papacy were around long before our modern democratic governments came into existence.
"In spite of the thinking of Montesquieu and Jefferson, we think that the majority of citizens should be the total weight of any balance needed. So our people control the legislature and the legislature controls the laws. We can veto the laws, but our executive cannot. Judges only interpret the laws, possibly based on what they actually say or what was the legislative intent behind the law. They can't go beyond that. We think that your Supreme Court system is ridiculous. You have politically appointed people, with lifetime tenure who can, by a majority of one, overturn a law passed by your two houses of the legislature and signed by your chief executive. And you call that a separation of powers!”
-"Sounds much more democratic than our republican form of government with our judge made laws. It makes a lot of sense to have fewer laws but to enforce those you have.”
-"Speaking of laws, Lee, have you seen some of those recently proposed laws in our country? They make my head swim. Recently I read of proposals to eliminate drivers licenses in Georgia because driving is an 'inalienable right.' Then in South Dakota there was a proposal to make everybody buy a gun. And in Kentucky there was a proposal to separate the state from the environmental laws so that coal mining would not be negatively affected by laws designed to protect the earth. On the other hand I think it is a good law to stop people from texting while driving but 30% of our drivers under the age of 30 have sent text messages during the last month while they were driving. They think the law doesn’t apply to them.
EXAMPLES OF OUR LAWS
GUNS AND GUN CONTROL
“ I hope your legislators are more intelligent than ours. Tyler, what about gun control in your country?”
"We don't have many gun control laws because we believe in freedom. But we do have some because we have a responsibility to protect our citizens from irresponsible gun use. We don't have as many guns as you have. Our people are aware that the more guns a country has, the more murders there are. The US has 90 guns per hundred people. In the UK they have six per hundred. And the murder rate in the US is 44 times higher than it is in the UK. It's funny how your gun ideas came into being. The right to own a musket so that 'a well regulated militia' could be maintained was a very liberal idea in its time. But now it has become a conservative value because you people want to conserve what you think are your rights. It was one thing in the late 1700s to have a musket so that you could protect the country against another war with England. Of course many of your people had guns for hunting. Both of these values were good for your society. The question now is whether that old value still has merit.
"When you have a doctor killed because he performed abortions, or you have a president murdered or a legislator shot, some people want to change that right. But it's not all bad, whenever a criminal was killed while robbing a bank it saves the state money in trials and the incarceration of that person. And another plus might be that overpopulation is being controlled by the murdering of people by criminals. So even though they are killed by criminals, it's still good for society because it reduces overpopulation. It seems to me that there are far more bad guys killed in your society than doctors, legislators and people who just happened to be in the way of the bullets.
"Then with so many people having guns and learning to shoot by target practice, you have many more people who can be quickly trained to be foot soldiers for your American armed forces. And maybe another advantage is that it provides jobs for munitions makers and law enforcement people."
-"I think that the human right to safety is more important than the civil right to own a gun. Is American society better off because Abraham Lincoln and John and Bobby Kennedy were killed by people who disagreed with their politics? What about that shooting in Tucson, Arizona in 2011 where the killer severely injured a national legislator and killed several other people. Admittedly he was severely mentally disturbed, but why was he able to buy a rapid firing pistol?"
"According the American Psychiatric Association (20)
the National Comorbidity Survey, published in 1996, found that 28 percent of Americans had experienced psychotic symptoms at some point in their lives. In the US there are 2 1/2 million schizophrenics, many of them violent, and most able to purchase firearms. We think this leads to violent anarchy. Some might say that the libertarian approach would not have any gun control, but remember we stress responsibility and mentally ill people certainly have an impaired ability to act responsibly. And these are people who are not in mental institutions. So you have a lot of mentally shaky people who can buy and use guns.”
-"The same week that the American legislator was shot, the governor of Pakistan's Punjab province was assassinated by one of his own guards because the governor thought that Pakistan's anti-blasphemy law was too strict. It allowed punishment by death for an insult to Islam, the Quran or the prophet Mohammed. A Christian woman had recently been sentenced to death for blasphemy under the law. The people rallied around the assassin. Obviously their ideas of how to protect their religion take precedence over how to protect their democracy. The governor had recently said that he was not afraid to stand up for his belief and had told his wife that she would probably soon be a widow. Then a few weeks later the Pakistani minister for religious minorities, also an opponent of the blasphemy bill, was assassinated.”
-"We have crazies everywhere on earth. But they don't all have access to firearms! I support our right to bear arms but I think there should be some kind of a mental test in order to get the license. And I am not alone. I read a survey a few years ago that indicated that 81% of gun owners and 86% of all Americans favored personal background checks for all firearm sales whether the guns were bought from a dealer or at a gun show. (21) Our relaxed gun laws have made it easy for criminals and terrorists to arm themselves. Last I heard the Mexican drug war that had claimed over 31,000 lives up to 2011, and of the 90,000 Mexican weapons seized by the government, 80% had been made in America."
-"At least that keeps our people employed!”
"Don't forget that we see responsibility as an absolute essential of liberty. Some people show they are not responsible through their actions or even their words. A person who drives recklessly, endangering others, can be denied a driver's license. People who have behaved irresponsibly at school or in their jobs may be tested and evaluated by our psychologists and psychiatrists. If a person cannot be certified as rationally responsible, he can be denied access to guns. We assume that people are rational but if they indicate otherwise we must do whatever is necessary to protect society from them."
-"Relative to gun control, how many innocent lives lost in a year would be required before licenses for gun ownership would be limited for those who had a propensity toward violence? Look at the six lives lost in the Arizona shooting of the Congresswoman. A nine-year-old girl who can only be seen as outstanding. A couple of people who were volunteers in the community or in the church. A young man who was engaged to be married. Interested citizens, nice people killed by a psychotic. When should we require stricter licenses? After 10,000 innocent people are killed in the year? After one innocent person is killed in the year? If a particularly important person, such as the president or a high level scientist is killed? Is there any level of gun violence that would make our country tighten up our freedom to carry guns?
“Did you know that last year 50 people on the government’s terrorist watch list bought guns. And they bought them legally.”(22)
"Private gun ownership is not mentioned in our constitution. But we do have some laws to control the types of guns that can be sold. Remember our freedom comes with responsibilities.”
-"We have such a romantic history of the old West with the good guys shooting the bad guys. Even today in Tombstone, Arizona that
famous gunfight at the OK Corral in 1881 is reenacted. Actually what is reenacted is the myth. The real fight occurred in an alley and Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday were not seen as heroes originally, in fact they were charged with murder. It wasn't til later when books, then television and movies, made them heroes.
"Back in those days Tombstone had much stricter gun laws than we do today. In fact that famous gunfight started when Marshall Virgil Earp tried to enforce a local ordinance that barred carrying guns in public. Earlier that day a judge had fined one of the victims $25 for packing a pistol. In those days you could wear a gun into town but you had to check it at the Sheriff's office or at the hotel and couldn't pick it up again until you left town. Tombstone's laws had been enacted to reduce violence.
"But today Arizona has some of the most lenient gun laws in the nation. While you can't take a gun into a doctor's office, you can carry a concealed weapon without a permit. You could carry a concealed gun into a bar, as long as you're not drinking. You can carry a gun to a school as long as it is not loaded and you stay in your car. And any law-abiding citizen 18 or older can buy and keep a rifle or shotgun. Of course to buy a handgun you must've reached the ripe old age of 21. There are some limitations however. Firearms can only be sold for 14 hours a day seven days a week and cannot be sold on Christmas."
-"Those NRA people keep telling us that if everybody caries a gun the crime rate will go down. But the truth is, the nations with the toughest gun-control laws have the least number of gun related deaths. Not only that, many of the people killed by guns are family members of the gun owners. But maybe that's an easy way to get rid of your in-laws or your unruly kids!"
”We allow guns but not the way that you do. Our hunters are allowed rifles with two shots or shotguns with two shots. Homeowners are allowed the same. I suppose if someone could come up with a good reason for having assault rifles or automatic pistols we might allow it. So far nobody has come up with good enough reasons, in fact it really isn’t even discussed. Remember that our freedom comes with responsibilities to others. The more of anything you have, the more likely it is that there will be some negatives. Look at the number of murders in your country. Obviously there are a lot of irresponsible people carrying guns."
"It seems that the right to own guns is so strong that American jurisprudence would find it difficult to reduce the present rights. But that is exactly what the Supreme Court did with the constitution's ex post facto protection that James Madison said was to be civil, not a criminal, right. Bills of attainder were to be the criminal equivalent. So if the Supreme Court can change one constitutional guarantee can't it do it for another one?”
FREE SPEECH
- “What about free speech? I would assume that you would allow everything just like we do."
"Not really. People can state a position, but they must validate it with evidence. Remember that our freedom comes with responsibilities. You seem to keep forgetting that. We insist on intelligent freedom of speech, not irresponsible or false rhetoric that seemed more designed to inflate an illiterate's ego than to put forth an issue worth debating. It is commonly believed in this country that because so many Americans' lack education and lack concern for world politics, you Americans seem to often deny facts. If you listen to the far right wing programs that denounce taxes and Democrats, you may believe that Barack Obama was raised in Kenya as a Muslim. The truth course is that he was raised in Hawaii by Republican grandparents. He was a Boy Scout, not a student in a madrasah. Your freedom of speech rules don’t require any truth in your speech. You are not required to validate your opinions. You can say anything you want as long as you are not inciting people to riot in the next few minutes.
"We believe that a person has not only the right, but also the duty, to speak out when there are wrongs that need to be righted or positions that need to be addressed. But because of our emphasis on responsibility we must think through our position when we advocate a cause. Your right and left leaning pundits in America could never get a job in our media unless they straightened up their acts! Their wild claims seem to be geared and targeted to inflame their audiences to believe and act without proof."
-"Doctor Wang was clear that a voice that we think is authoritative is a major source of our evidence. We believe our mother when she said Santa left the presents and we believe our ministers when they tell us that God will judge us on the last day. These far right and far left media and clerical voices work on our psychological sides not on our logical sides."